The League of Tana Tea Drinkers

Our mission is to acknowledge, foster, and support thoughtful, articulate, and creative blogs built on an appreciation of the horror and sci-horror genres.

Horror bloggers are a unique group of devoted fans and professionals, from all walks of life, who keep the genre, in all its permutations and media outlets, alive and kicking. Often spending long hours to keep their blogs informative and fun, horror bloggers share their unique mix of personality, culture and knowledge freely to fans of a genre difficult to describe, and fun to fear.

We honor exemplary horror blogs with our own special insignia: one that signifies the heights to which we aspire, and the code of excellence we follow to promote horror in all its wonderfully frightening forms, from classic to contemporary, from philosophical to schlockical.

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers are bloggers who toil away the extra midnight hour to present the best in horror blogging to reach the heights of horrifying excellence. We know what rapture it is to sip tana tea in the full moon light, and feel the thrill of walking the dark passageways in cinema and literature, searching for the unusual, the terrifying, and the monstrous. For the fun of it.

Keep watching the skies, and reading the horror. LOTT D is coming for you!

--jmcozzoli, Zombos' Closet of Horror

September 13, 2009

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Unspeakable Horror

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In thisongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Chad Helder of Unspeakable Horror tells us how his unintentions paved the royal road to his horror writing career in poetry, fiction, and comic books.

The horror genre gained my fascination in the turbulent years of Junior High School. The first most important thing I remember was reading Poe in Ms. Shoemaker's English class. I stayed after class one day to ask her if writing horror stories made Poe more mentally unstable, and she told me that writing horror stories probably helped him release his demons and made him more stable. I liked that answer, and I wrote a couple of horror stories in Junior High, a story about a phantom hockey player and a story about an insane person with fog in his mind.

I really returned to the horror genre in college. I didn't intend to focus on the horror genre, but I clearly became preoccupied with horror themes and motifs. As a freshman in college, I wrote a one-act play about a young man whose dog is run over by the local police detective who is hunting for "the grapefruit killer." I wrote my very first poem that year, a poem about a young with mice in his pockets who is beingfollowed by an ominous owl. As a sophomore, I tried writing my first novel, and I finished it: a story about an underground murder organization that manufactures a poison called "The Crunch," and an insane man who lives in his brother's attic and communes with a world of alien spirits. Then, I started taking some serious poetry workshops in college, and the horror genre popped up right in the center of the frame. I didn't intend to write about horror, but it featured prominently in my poetry. I wrote about Satan haunting me while I grew up as the son of a minister, and I wrote about a phantom hitchhiker, and a Satanic crossing guard at an elementary school.

I still really wanted to write a horror novel, even though my poetry far, far outshined my prose. After graduate school, I started working on a novel called Bartholomew of the Scissors. While I was working on this novel, I started to discover a subgenre of horror stories with gay themes and characters, and I started visiting websites like Queer Horror and Camp Blood. I began making connections between my fascination with the horror genre and my problems with coming out of the closet. I paired this with some literary criticism, and I started my Unspeakable Horror blog and website in 2006.

Soon after that I met Vince Liaguno through the website. He offered lots of really interested comments on my blog, so I invited him to be a blogger on the website. He blogged about slasher movies on Unspeakable Horror for over a year, and then he started the current incarnation of Slasher Speak. This new working relationship led to the Unspeakable Horror anthology. Vince and I read submissions from October until May, often about 35 submissions a month. From those submissions we put together the queer horror anthology that launched Dark Scribe press and won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology.

Bartholomew of the Scissors never worked out as a novel, but I had the idea of turning it into a graphic novel when I met Darren from Bluewater Comics in Bellingham, Washington. The four issues of the comic book were released last fall, and the graphic novel version will be released right before Halloween this year. I'm really excited about the graphic novel version because I think the story works better as a cohesive whole, as opposed to being split up in four issues.

After my brief stint as a comic book writer, now I'm committed to writing poetry and showing reluctant poetry readers that poetry is much more than what they think. Next year, The Pop-Up Book of Death will be released from Queer Mojo Press, and this fall I'm finishing a book of horror poems for Dark Scribe press. I'm really excited about this collection because I've been writing some of my best and most disturbing poetry.

1 comment:

Chad's horror poetry is not to be missed. Even if you're not "into" poetry, his rich use of imagery and the way he finds the perfect union of words to convey a mental snapshot image will soon have you reciting poetry from the rooftops!